Proud-pied April: Stars at elbow and foot

Our final poem for National Poetry Month is from Dylan Thomas. We last heard from him three years ago, so we're due.

We should also visit this particular piece because I’ve dragged you through a lot of death this month, for some reason. Between Irish history, World War I and various terror activities, we’ve waded through a lot of blood. So let’s allow Thomas to take us beyond that mortal threshold, when the clean bones are gone. It’s a good way to see us out of this April.

“And Death Shall Have No Dominion”

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead man naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;

Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up they shan't crack;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the seashores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion.

Proud-pied April: What LIFE is really all about

Alright, we’ve had some pretty grim poems throughout this month, so time to change it up. How about something from Roald Dahl? That’s got to be a bit of a laugh.

Well, now that I consider it—I suppose the laugh factor involved here rather depends on whether you’re the farmer or the pig.

Whatever.

“The Pig”

In England once there lived a big

And wonderfully clever pig.

To everybody it was plain

That Piggy had a massive brain.

He worked out sums inside his head,

There was no book he hadn't read.

He knew what made an airplane fly,

He knew how engines worked and why.

He knew all this, but in the end

One question drove him round the bend:

He simply couldn't puzzle out

What LIFE was really all about.

What was the reason for his birth?

Why was he placed upon this earth?

His giant brain went round and round.

Alas, no answer could be found.

Till suddenly one wondrous night.

All in a flash he saw the light.

He jumped up like a ballet dancer

And yelled, "By gum, I've got the answer!"

"They want my bacon slice by slice

"To sell at a tremendous price!

"They want my tender juicy chops

"To put in all the butcher's shops!

"They want my pork to make a roast

"And that's the part'll cost the most!

"They want my sausages in strings!

"They even want my chitterlings!

"The butcher's shop! The carving knife!

"That is the reason for my life!"

Such thoughts as these are not designed

To give a pig great piece of mind.

Next morning, in comes Farmer Bland,

A pail of pigswill in his hand,

And piggy with a mighty roar,

Bashes the farmer to the floor…

Now comes the rather grizzly bit

So let's not make too much of it,

Except that you must understand

That Piggy did eat Farmer Bland,

He ate him up from head to toe,

Chewing the pieces nice and slow.

It took an hour to reach the feet,

Because there was so much to eat,

And when he finished, Pig, of course,

Felt absolutely no remorse.

Slowly he scratched his brainy head

And with a little smile he said,

"I had a fairly powerful hunch

"That he might have me for his lunch.

"And so, because I feared the worst,

"I thought I'd better eat him first.

And here is a delightful rendition, courtesy of Pam Ferris:

Proud-pied April: I am a pause

Let’s return to Latin America for today’s addition to National Poetry Month. Like the Chilean Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz was both a poet and a diplomat, in this case in the service of Mexico. He also was a Nobelist, winning for literature in 1990.

I love the moment captured in “Between Going and Staying”. It strikes me as something you’d read in a quantum physics paper: that frozen moment of light, matter and motion that the poet wraps in words. But not one extraneous word. See for yourself:

“Between Going and Staying”

Between going and staying the day wavers,

in love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay

where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,

all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,

rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats

the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall

into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,

watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters.

 Motionless,

I stay and go: I am a pause.

In the original:

“Entre irse y quedarse”

Entre irse y quedarse dude el día,
enamorado de su transparencia.

La tarde circular es ya bahía:
en su quieto vaivén se mece el munco.

Todo es visible y todo es elusivo,
todo está cerca y todo es intocable.

Los papeles, el libro, el vaso, el lápiz
reposan a la sombra de sus nombres

Latir del tiempo que en mi sien repite
la misma terca sílaba de sangre.

La luz hace del muro indiferente
un espectral teatro de reflejos.

En el centro de un ojo me descubro;
no me mira, me miro en su mirada.

Se disipa el instante.  Sin moverme,
yo me quedo y me voy: soy una pausa.

Proud-pied April: Peaceful share of Time

It’s the last Wednesday in National Poetry Month, so one final poem from World War I.

Siegfried Sassoon is one of the best-known of the war poets. His experiences at the Western Front transformed him, moving from patriotic support to bitter, public opposition. Like Wilfred Owen, Sassoon used poetic language and structure to convey the kinds of things that newspapers did not report: filth, vermin, rotting corpses; terror, incompetence, futility.

In response to writing what became a public anti-war statement, Sassoon was sent to a military psychiatric hospital. If he’d not been part of the county-Cambridge-and-cricket set, he might instead have been jailed for voicing such opinions. He enjoyed quite a long and distinguished career as poet, novelist and editor following the war, which is kind of an anomaly for many of his contemporaries, who were not granted the reprieve of life or health.

He wrote “Aftermath” in 1919, and it was published the following year.

“Aftermath”

Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.

But the past is just the same-and War’s a bloody game...
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz–
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench-
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack–
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads—those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

Proud-pied April: The cicada's cry

A recent Washington Post story announced that many states in the Northeast are about to experience a 17-year cicada awakening. Cicadas, in case you’ve never experienced them, are members of the locust family, and when they come (in either 13-year or 17-year cycles) you understand why they were one of the plagues God visited upon Egypt as encouragement to let the Children of Israel go.

It’s not just the singing, although there’s something very apocalyptic about their aggregate sound. It’s their omnipresence in numbers you cannot imagine. Especially splattering on your windscreen.

(Note to self: get new wiper blades and check that windscreen fluid is topped up.)

At any rate, in honor of what we may be about to experience here in the Old Dominion, let’s have some haiku about cicadas from the master, Basho.

A cicada shell;

It sang itself

Utterly away

In the cicada’s cry

There’s no sign that can foretell

How soon it must die

Stillness—

The cicada’s cry

Drills into the rocks

Proud-pied April: A circle with no God

I’ve been hanging my daily poems this month around my office walls. One of my colleagues caught a few of them and wondered why I’ve got such dreary poetry decorating the place. Well, first off—he overlooked Shakespeare and Carroll. But I’ll concede the point that this year I’ve been pulling in some difficult topics. And here’s another, this time from Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

Amichai was born in Germany, but his family emigrated to the (then British) Palestine Mandate territory when he was 11. Like some of my other choices this month (Sidney, Gurney, Radnóti), Amichai served in the military. First in the British army during World War II, then in the Israeli army in various wars against the Arabs.

He took as subjects the everyday world he found around him, which is one of the reasons I find “The Diameter of the Bomb” so gripping. The everyday world around him was violent, and the way he measures out the impact of that violence here, juxtaposing all the impersonal numbers and geometry against the dreadful human cost, is poetry at its most powerful.

“The Diameter of the Bomb”

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters

and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,

with four dead and eleven wounded.

And around these, in a larger circle

of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered

and one graveyard. But the young woman

who was buried in the city she came from,

at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,

enlarges the circle considerably,

and the solitary man mourning her death

at the distant shores of a country far across the sea

includes the entire world in the circle.

And I won't even mention the howl of orphans

that reaches up to the throne of God and

beyond, making

a circle with no end and no God.

Translation by Chana Bloch

Gratitude Monday: Throwing plagues and asking questions

It’s been a number of years since I’ve been to a Seder—well into the last century, now that I think of it. So I was very happy to be invited to one held on Friday by friends I’ve “met” in the past year.

(Thank you, Internet.)

A Seder, if you are at all unclear, is the meal that commemorates the exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. It’s a little like Thanksgiving, because it is a giving of thanks, and also because the food is inextricably woven into the Tradition. Meaning: just as it can be a real Bone of Contention if your family has cornbread stuffing at Thanksgiving and it turns out that your partner’s has oyster stuffing, there may need to be UN-level negotiations as to whether you have potato latkes or matzo latkes at your Passover Seder.

Thankfully, this was not an issue on Friday. There were both potato and matzo latkes, as well as two kinds of charoset, multiple kugels and every other holiday thing you could think of.

Depending on your family background, at Seder you can spend literally hours reading the Haggadah, with or without heated interpretive discussions; or you can do an extremely abbreviated version, ask the Four Questions and get straight to the brisket. There are certain elements common to every iteration, but you can take it from there.

As I said, it’s been a while since my last Seder, and mine have always been, uh, unorthodox. (I’m thinking in particular about the one with people from film school, where we watched the Passover portion of The Ten Commandments, and had the youngest black, male Catholic ask the Four Questions.) There were two elements of Friday’s that I don’t recall from the past: the Throwing of the Plagues, and the Asking of the Questions in multiple languages.

What languages, you inquire? Well, English, Latin, Russian, Yiddish, German, Dutch, French, Norwegian, Arabic, Spanish and Klingon.

It was a lovely family meal, with more than 20 people at long tables stretched across two rooms. And I’m very grateful to have been part of it.

Proud-pied April: We know their dream

As this is the actual hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising (24 April 1916), and as it is not possible to get through National Poetry Month without something from William Butler Yeats, let’s have the granddaddy of them all, “Easter 1916”. It’s the one that has, in its closing lines, come to define modern Ireland.

Yeats was an Irish nationalist, but not a revolutionary. He decried the use of violence, until the Brits began summary executions. He was so appalled by the response that he was even willing to count John MacBride as a hero/martyr, naming him in the litany that also includes Pearse and Connolly. MacBride was the "drunken, vain-glorious lout" who married Maude Gonne, the woman Yeats loved hopelessly his whole life, thus twice-loathed by the poet. But in the face of the institutional barbarism of the British authorities, he was willing to give his rival some props.

You can see Yeats trying to feel his way through his reaction to the rising—moving through chitchat at the club, speculating on what contributions the individual Fenians might have made and wondering if such a blood sacrifice was necessary, because "England may keep faith". In the end, though, what's done is done, and nothing will be the same.

“Easter 1916”

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or a gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

Being certain that they and I

But lived where motley is worn:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent

In ignorant good will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers

When young and beautiful,

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school

And rode our winged horse.

This other his helper and friend

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,

So sensitive his nature seemed,

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vain-glorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter, seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute change.

A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute;

A horse-hoof slides on the brim;

And a horse plashes within it

Where long-legged moor-hens dive

And hens to moor-cocks call.

Minute by minute they live:

The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is heaven's part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child

When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death.

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead.

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in a verse –

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.